Take the Test: An Initial Investigation on the Common Errors in Multiple-choice Questions in English Quarterly Assessments

Abstract

Classroom assessment is one of the most important aspects of the teaching-learning process. While there are several available references that offer excellent advice on preparation and construction of effective objective tests for students, there remains to be frequent reports of deficiencies or lapses in locally developed classroom examinations especially in multiple-choice tests. The aim of this descriptive study was to determine the common errors in multiple choice questions (MCQs) in teacher-made quarterly assessments in English in one public secondary school in Ilocos Norte, Philippines. Frequency counts and percentages were used to treat the data gathered. The interpretation and analysis of data utilized the basic principles of constructing MCQs used in the study of Kar, Lakshminarayanan, and Mahalakshmy (2015). The findings show that the multiple-choice questions in English quarterly assessments had errors related to content issues, writing the stem, writing the distractors, and formatting and style issues. Of these four categories of errors, the most committed errors were related to writing the stem while the least committed errors were related to content issues. It can be concluded that, generally, nearly half of test items in English quarterly assessments need to be reconstructed or corrected as these have negative implications to the students’ test performance and, subsequently, to their academic standing.